Sweetie, don't look at him, kiss me.

Lin Qingmian looked at Lin Qingqing's slightly reddened eyes and her deliberately humble posture, and her fingers holding the plate did not move.

"Why are you apologizing?" she asked.

Lin Qingqing was stunned for a moment: "What?"

"You said 'there were some things I didn't do well before,'" Lin Qingmian's voice was neither loud nor soft, "which thing are you referring to? Did you take my design drafts to participate in a competition, or did you steal my dress design to make a garment, or did you say 'Mianmian will have a good home' when you helped my parents sell me?"

Lin Qingqing's expression froze for a moment. She stood there, her lips moving as if she were quickly searching for the right words in her mind, but she couldn't come up with anything.

Lin Qingmian looked at her like that and didn't wait for her to answer. "If you really wanted to apologize, you didn't need to come all the way to the school cafeteria to wait for me. You could have just sent a message, and I would have seen it. But you came here so that I could see your red eyes, so that I would know you were crying, and so that I would soften my heart."

She placed the plate on the clearing table, turned to look at her, and said, "I won't be soft-hearted."

Lin Qingqing stood in the middle of the cafeteria aisle. Students carrying plates squeezed past her, and some glanced back at her. Her eyes were even redder than before, but this time it wasn't from crying; it was from holding her breath, unable to release it.

"Mianmian," her voice finally broke down, the last syllable tinged with an barely suppressed sharpness, "Do you think that now that you're in a different position, you don't need to care about your family anymore? We're family, blood is thicker than water—"

"The day you got engaged to Ji Xingye," Lin Qingmian interrupted her, "didn't you say you'd call me 'Little Aunt' from now on?"

She watched Lin Qingqing's face instantly become quite interesting. "Between my aunt and my niece-in-law, there shouldn't be any 'blood is thicker than water' relationship. At most, they're related by marriage."

Lin Qingqing's lips trembled slightly, wanting to retort, but she was rendered speechless by Lin Qingmian's light-hearted words. Lin Qingmian didn't linger and turned to walk towards the cafeteria entrance. As she passed the rows of tables and chairs, she could feel Lin Qingqing's gaze on her back, like two thin needles, not painful, but persistent.

She didn't turn around.

It was already dark when the last class of the afternoon ended. Lin Qingmian packed her bag and walked out of the teaching building, heading towards the main gate along the school path. The streetlights had just come on, reflecting a faint glow on the raindrops that hadn't been completely dried by the night wind. When she reached the school gate, she saw a dark gray car parked by the roadside. It wasn't the black Cayenne that Ji Linzhou usually drove; the window was half-rolled down, revealing a face that she recognized somewhat.

Bai Cheng leaned out of the driver's seat and waved to her: "Madam, the master sent me to pick you up."

She walked over, opened the car door, sat in the back seat, and fastened her seatbelt: "Where did he go?"

"Sir has a dinner engagement tonight with some business partners. He said it wouldn't be safe for you to take a taxi home alone, so he asked me to pick you up." Bai Cheng paused, then took a paper bag from the passenger seat and handed it to him. "Oh, by the way, Sir asked me to bring this to you."

She took it and opened it; inside was a box of still-warm roasted chestnuts.

She held the bag of chestnuts, feeling the warmth seep through the paper bag into her palm. She looked down at them for a while, and the corners of her mouth unconsciously curved into a smile.